Rooftop Eaves

*This one started with the image of summer heat on a tar roof and the question of what would happen if you only had one night to explore someone completely different. Thank you for reading, I hope the heat comes through.*

The fire escape on the east side of the building was older than Dara was, and it let her know it. Every rung rattled. The bolts were furred with rust, and somewhere around the fourth floor a pigeon had made a home she had to duck under. By the time she pulled herself over the last ladder onto the tar and gravel, her shirt was stuck to her back and her hands had orange dust on the palms.

It was 11 PM on a Thursday in July and the roof was still giving off heat. The tar had soaked up the whole day and was now handing it back, slow, like it had nowhere better to send it. She could smell exhaust from the street, hot metal off the AC units, and way off to the east, the faint salt of the river.

And there he was, right where Suzi said he'd be. Terry sat on the edge of the roof with his legs dangling over seven stories of nothing, watching the skyline like it was television. His shirt was open at the collar and he wasn't sweating at all, which seemed unfair.

"You're actually here," he said without turning around. "Suzi said you would be. I told her fifty bucks."

"Sorry to cost you money." Dara walked over but stopped a few steps short of the edge. She did not love heights. She did not love edges. She liked him fine, though, in the confused way you like a puzzle. "You're sitting on the lip of a building. Doesn't that bother you?"

"No." He patted the gravel next to him. "Here. Sit or stand, whatever's better. I brought beer."

There were two bottles sitting upright in the gravel between his boots. She picked one up. It was still cold, which was its own small mystery, because he had nothing up here to keep anything cold. She decided not to ask yet. She sat down cross-legged instead of dangling, kept one hand on the tar behind her, and opened the beer on her belt buckle like her father taught her.

"Cheers," she said.

"Cheers." He tapped his bottle against hers. He drank as if tasting it for the first time every single time, a little pause, a small nod.

They watched the city for a bit. The office towers across the way still had a few lit windows in them, and the antennae on the tall buildings blinked their red lights in no rhythm she could figure out. A siren went somewhere below them and faded.

"Suzi told you I was curious," Dara said. It wasn't a question. "I'm going to have a word with her."

"Don't. She didn't say anything wrong. She said, and I'm quoting, Dara keeps asking what you are and I'm tired of making things up." He shrugged. "I wanted to see if you'd actually come up here. Lots of people say they're curious and then they stay home where it's air conditioned."

"Well, it's a sauna up here, so I hope I get points for that."

"You get points."

She drank and studied him sideways. She'd met Terry once before, at a party at Suzi's place last summer, and he'd spent most of it near the window with his eyes half on the street. Suzi had known him for three years from some adult education class, pottery or something, and when Dara had asked her about him, Suzi had just smiled and said he's Terry, he's around.

Around was a good word for him. He looked early thirties and didn't look quite finished. His skin had a faint sheen to it in the dark, like the last second of a camera flash. When a helicopter passed overhead a few blocks away, the small hairs on his arm stood up and lay back down in a wave, and he didn't seem to notice.

"Can I ask something, then? Since you invited the questions."

"Ask anything."

"Your hand." She reached toward it and stopped, hovering. "May I?"

He turned his palm up on the gravel. "Go ahead."

She laid her fingers on it. It was warm, warmer than the night justified, and under the skin there was a fine vibration, steady, like a transformer hum you could only feel and not hear. Not unpleasant. Her own hand started to buzz faintly where they touched.

"Huh," she said.

"Yeah. That's usually the reaction." He watched her fingers instead of her face. "It's worse in thunderstorms. Better in fog."

"So it's real. Suzi wasn't winding me up." She pulled her hand back and wrapped it around her beer. "What are you, Terry? Actually. No poetry."

He laughed, short and honest. "No poetry, okay. I'm tied into the city. Power lines, phone masts, the radar at the airport, all of it. Wherever the current and the signals run thick, that's my ground. I can't go far from a live grid. I don't eat much. I don't sleep much. I show up on photographs blurry."

"Blurry."

"Blurry. Suzi has four pictures of me and in all of them I'm a smear on the wall."

She snorted into her bottle. That was so stupid and so exactly right that she felt better immediately, like someone had opened a window in her chest. "Okay. Fine. That's insane and I believe you, which is its own problem."

"Believing it's the easy part," he said. "Most people believe me. It's the next day that gets them."

Dara looked out at the red lights on the towers. She thought about how to say the next part and decided to just say it the plain way.

"I got out of a three-year thing in April," she said. "We started dating when I was twenty-five, and at twenty-eight I still wasn't sure. That's how I knew. If you have to keep asking yourself, the answer's already no."

"What was wrong with him?"

"Nothing. That's the rotten part. He was kind, he was steady, he had a decent car and liked my cooking. My mother adored him." She picked at the label on her bottle. "But I was settling. Every day I stayed was a day I chose okay instead of maybe. And I got tired of choosing okay. He didn't do anything wrong. I just couldn't keep doing it to either of us."

"Four months on your own now?"

"Three months next week. I'm fine during the day. Nights are long."

Terry nodded slowly, and the red light on the tallest tower across the street flickered once, and she would have sworn his eyes flickered with it, same beat.

"I've never had a relationship," he said. "Not one that lasted past dawn. Not because nobody wanted one. Because I can't give one. I'm only solid while the sun's down. Ask me what I do at noon and the answer is, I'm not anywhere you'd recognize. So I keep it to one night by design. It's kinder that way."

"That's a lonely design."

"It's a practical design." He took a long drink. "Lonely comes with the lot. I knew that when I got made, or however it happened."

She didn't touch that. Some things you didn't poke the first night. The helicopter came back around, farther off now, and this time she saw his arm do the hair thing on purpose, or at least she thought it was on purpose, like a man flexing a party trick he'd forgotten to hide.

"How long do you have tonight?" she asked. "If you're only good till dawn."

"Sunrise is at 5:42. So call it six hours." He said the time fast and exact, like he kept it in his pocket. "After that I have to be wherever it is I go, and you'd be very tired and very sunburnt, because the sun up here is a crime."

"So if we're doing this, whatever this is, we've got six hours."

"About that." He turned and looked at her straight for the first time since she'd climbed up. His eyes had a faint amber ring around the pupil that she was certain wasn't there at the party last summer. "I want to be plain with you, since you were plain with me. I came up here because I was curious too. Suzi talks about you enough that I felt like I already knew you. And one night is all I've got to offer anyone. If that's a dealbreaker, I'll walk you down the fire escape and we'll say it was nice and that'll be true."

Dara drank the last of her beer and set the empty bottle in the gravel.

"Nobody's ever offered me six clear hours with no games attached," she said. "My ex would've spent the first two apologizing for things that hadn't happened yet."

"So?"

"So." She looked at his hand, still resting palm up between them, humming away. "Ask me properly, Terry. Whatever it is you're circling around. Ask."

* * *

"So here's my question," Terry said. "You already know what I am. Do you want to see what I look like? The real look, not the suit I wear to walk around in."

"Yes," she said, and then laughed at herself for how fast it came out. "God, yes. Obviously yes."

"Fair warning. It's a lot."

"Terry. I just watched the hairs on your arm do a wave. I've been sitting here waiting for the weird part. Show me the weird part."

He put his bottle down in the gravel next to hers and stood up. He walked a few steps toward the middle of the roof, away from the edge, and stopped with the AC units behind him. For a second nothing happened, and Dara thought he was stalling.

Then he started humming. Low, almost below hearing, and she felt it in her back teeth before she heard it. The floodlights on the roof's far corner flickered. Once, twice, then a fast stutter, keeping time with his hum. Across the alley, the lights in the neighboring building's windows joined in, whole floors of them blinking like a bad fuse.

She laughed so hard she had to sit the rest of the way down. "Stop it. Stop, you'll trigger somebody's fire drill."

He stopped and the lights steadied. "You laugh when you're nervous."

"I laugh when it's good. Do it in a pattern. Come on. Something I can read."

He hummed again, and this time it wasn't random. Short and long and short, deliberate, and the window lights across the alley spelled it out one dot and dash at a time. She watched, mouth open, counting in her head